Wednesday, 19 July 2017

The retrospective exhibition Mountains, skulls and flowers at Tate
Modern puts into perspective the work and life of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986).
Known as a pioneer of American early modernism, she was also the only female
artist close to avant-garde circles in New York exhibiting during the 1910’s at
291 Gallery run by the renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz, her future husband. She was quick to reject her training in
academic styles derived from European models, developing instead a body of work
marked by internal necessities and personal sensations, which became central to
inventing her own idiosyncratic language.

The single flower
paintings she made from 1920s until the 1950s, monochrome and coloured which
became synonymous with her name, maximize the soft contours and intricacies of
cala lilies and oriental poppies, rescuing them from their “destiny” of pure
decorations or nature morte. The
generalized interpretation is that her flowers open up like a vulva, therefore
her femalehood is at stake, caused
O’Keeffe much anguish and disregarded such analysis as purely ideological. So
vehement was her reaction against Freudian interpretations, that in the hope of
distancing herself from such readings she incorporated realism within her
semi-abstraction style. Nevertheless, her legacy is strongly associated with
feminist American art, and not only, adding a major, much needed brick to the
history of women’s contributions to visual culture. But since no work of art is
reducible to a single “true’ meaning, or can be ahistorical, the sensual nature
of her work could be associated with her early interest in synaestesia, the theory predicated on the influence of a sense over
another sense. Her early abstractions like Grey
Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow (1923) are predicated on her desire to
paint music. Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was perhaps the first to have used
the same discovery for visualizing music in his
series of paintings, titled Compositions
(1913).

O’Keeffe
is primarily a landscape painter and the locations she found herself in hugely
influenced the subject matter. From the exhibition leaflet, we find out that
while in New York and living on the 30th floor, she turned her
attention to skyscrapers and fully embraced the city with its dynamic energy
and high hopes for the future. While still maintaining a realistic style, the
skyscrapers in her representations are somehow scaled down, their majesty is
absent and they don’t intimidate anymore. In 1929 she left New York because of
the crash in order to take up residency in the rural area of New Mexico, where
she would return for long stays until eventually taking up permanent residence.

The exhibition
follows a museum type of curating, specific not only to Tate, when mounting on
solo retrospective, which contextualises her time spent away from the city,
through rich biographical material as in photographs, letters and memorabilia.It was there, in the dry desert where she started first
collecting and then painting animal skulls and bones against the backdrop of
pastel coloured landscapes, at a time when writers and painters were searching
for a specifically American iconography. The last rooms at Tate are dedicated
to showing archive material like studio photographs and drawings, and also her
increasing interest in depicting both pre-colonial gods, like Kachica (1934).Whether
maximizing flowers or scaling down skyscrapers, what becomes apparent is we how
O’Keeffe’s framing devises are always in flux, allowing her work to register
immediate and highly visceral responses to the diverse environments she inhabited.